Newbie question about text encoding

[Marko Rauhamaa]

Mark Lawrence <breamoreboy at yahoo.co.uk>:

> On 07/03/2015 16:25, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
>> Here's an example:
>>
>>     b = b'\x80'
>>
>> Yes, it generates an exception. IOW, UTF-8 is not a bijective mapping
>> from str objects to bytes objects.
>
> Python 2 might, Python 3 doesn't.

   Python 3.3.2 (default, Dec  4 2014, 12:49:00) 
   [GCC 4.8.3 20140911 (Red Hat 4.8.3-7)] on linux
   Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
   >>> b'\x80'.decode('utf-8')
   Traceback (most recent call last):
     File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
   UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0x80 in position 0:
   invalid start byte


Marko